I am building something community oriented and Discourse looks perfect for it. But my eventual plan is to port the community to a custom app later. Curious if anyone has done it before and how hard/easy would it be to do so. Don’t want to lock into the ecosystem.

That would largely be a data migration like any other. The tables are pretty self-explanatory? Or you could just do everything via the API and build your own front end, keeping the Discourse database structure and back end …

It depends on what “port the community to a custom app later” means. If you want to migrate away from Discourse to a custom-made database+backend+frontend+etc, a data migration is the way. If you want to keep using the data and backend layers of Discourse, using it as a headless service and writing a new frontend consuming the existing APIs, that’s also possible and has been done before. One thing to consider, though, is that Discourse is HUGE, like REALLY HUGE. The chat feature for example is a big undertake, and it’s just a tiny little fraction of what Discourse is. Rewriting these UIs will certainly feel like reinventing the wheel, and once you have all these features taken for granted on your community it will be hard to migrate to a custom app missing them.

[image] Renato Atilio: If you want to keep using the data and backend layers of Discourse, using it as a headless service and writing a new frontend consuming the existing APIs, that’s also possible and has been done before. Thanks so much for your reply. Do you have any examples / case studies on this? Any website/app that uses discourse in a headless manner?

[image] Lexicon: a customizable native mobile app for your Discourse site Extras Hey everyone, I wanted to quickly drop in here and mention that I’ve just open-sourced a project called Lexicon with some colleagues of mine. It’s a pre-built, customizable native mobile app built on top of the Discourse API. We built it to help quickly integrate discussion and messaging features into other native mobile projects. This project was really enjoyable to build, primarily due to all of the hard work done in advance by the Discourse core team and community over the years. Screensh… [image] Fig - Native Discourse client for iOS Extras Just wanted to introduce a project I have been working on. It is called Fig, and it is native Discourse client for iOS/iPadOS. Fig is available for free on the App Store. [Screen Shot 2020-04-14 at 8.02.48 AM] Most of the functions and features in Fig are free and will be plentiful for most users. Fig+ subscription allows access to private communities, unlimited number of posts and communities, free app icons, and future premium features. It will also help sustain the continuous development o…

This is fantastic! Thank you so much for sharing these. I’ve been browsing some discussions on people trying to build a full-blown social-network on discourse. If you have any examples of those, do let me know. I haven’t yet come across a serious implementation of discourse on the web that doesn’t look like a forum.

Also consider Federation and take a look at: [image] Federation support for Discourse Feature The mail goal of this feature is to connect all the Discourse communities like how Mastodon makes use of global and local feeds to maintain a healthy and decentralized network of Mastodon instances which allows a user from one instance to connect, follow, and discuss on topics of another instance. I think this will open up a lot of new features for Discourse. The benefit Imagine being able to just connect to your own local community and then be able to get news about other topics from other Di… There’s also a Whitelisted App for iOS and Android that leverages React Native and Webview: [image] Whitelisted Discourse app with Push Notifications via OneSignal Plugin Following up on the discussion here, I have successfully set up a fork of the official Discourse app that can send push notifications via the OneSignal API. There are two parts to this: discourse-onesignal - a Discourse plugin that sends Push Notifications to OneSignal’s REST API and a Discourse Mobile Single Site App built similarly to the official Discourse Mobile app (using React Native), but using OneSignal for notifications and a simplified interface to suit the needs of a single app. I…

Well said. I’d also add the enormous non-technical challenges of gaining traction, attracting users, getting the word about, marketing … feature set - what are you offering which gives people something they can’t get from the mainstream apps? Oh and finance … time … At least forums can fit into small niches to attract an audience … and don’t rely on a massive staff. No harm in giving it a good go though: nothing ventured, nothing gained! (and probably nothing learned!)

Thanks for the reply. Really appreciate taking time. Precisely to de-risk non-technical challenges, I want to go with Discourse.

I didn’t know there was a proposal for federation—that would be quite cool. Thanks for sharing.

Hi Paras, Can you share some of your findings please? Do you have any clue about how difficult it is to develop simple and medium complexity features? I guess the developers need to have experience with the stack. But then they need to figure out the workings of the platform and then start puzzling and building? Apart from the examples give in the comments, is this done a lot? Why/why not? Thank you

How easy is it to port Discourse community to custom webapp later?

Development

merefield (Robert) March 9, 2023, 9:36am 5

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How easy is it to port Discourse community to custom webapp later?

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